Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain Read Online Free PDF Page A

middle age, we all have similar stories—and worries. But the latest science is reassuring. It’s true that the first changes from degenerative brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s often begin much earlier than we thought. But researchers have now begun to sort out the differences between the stirrings of dementia and the normal aging process. And most of us, while beset with a normal level of middle-aged muddle, are, in fact, quite normal.
    What’s more, we’re quite smart. And, on some level—if we think about it—we know that, too. For instance, my friend who complained about battling her brain every day was recently promoted to a new, high-level job that involves intense scrutiny of detail. And despite her middle-aged brain—perhaps because of her middle-aged brain—she’s already handling that job with ease. She knows what to pay attention to and what to ignore. She knows how to get from point A to point B. She knows what she’s doing.

    The middle-aged brain is a contradiction. Some parts run better than others. But perhaps more than at any other age, our brains in middle age are more than the sum of their parts.
    In fact, as we shall see, long-term studies now provide evidence that, despite a misstep now and then, our cognitive abilities continue to grow. For the first time, researchers are pulling apart such qualities as judgment and wisdom and finding out how and why they develop. Neuroscientists are pinpointing how our neurons—and even the genes that govern them—adapt and even improve with age. “I’d have to say from what we know now,” says Laura Carstensen, director of the Stanford Center on Longevity at Stanford University and a leader of the new research, “that the middle-aged brain is downright formidable.”
    A friend who is a poet told me recently that she does not think that she could have written the poetry she does until she had reached her mid-fifties—until her brain had reached its formidable age.
    “It feels like all the pieces needed to come together,” she said. “It’s only now that my brain feels ready. It can see how the world fits together—and make poetry out of it.”

2 The Best Brains of Our Lives
    A Bit Slower, but So Much Better
    Here’s a short quiz. Look at the following list:
    January February March April January February March May January February March June January February March—
    What would the next word be?
    Got it? Now, how about this one:
    January February Wednesday March April Wednesday May June Wednesday July August Wednesday—
    What would the next word be?
    Now try it with numbers. Look at this series:
    1 4 3 2 5 4 3 6 5
    What would the next number be?
    Did you get them all?
    These are examples of questions that measure basic logic and reasoning. The answers are, in order, July, September, and, for the number sequence the next number would be 4 (and then 76. The series goes like this: 1-43 2-54 3-65 4-76 and so on).
    Such problems test our abilities to recognize patterns and are routinely used by scientists to see how our cognitive—or thinking—processes are holding up. And if you’re middle-aged and have figured out all of them, you can be proud—your brain is humming along just fine.
    Indeed, despite long-held beliefs to the contrary, there’s mounting evidence that at middle age we may be smarter than we were in our twenties.
    How can that be? How can we possibly be smarter and be putting the bananas in the laundry basket? Smarter and still unable, once we get to the hardware store, to remember why we went there in the first place? Smarter and, despite our best efforts to concentrate on one thing at a time, finding our brains bouncing about like billiard balls?
    To begin to understand how that might be, there is no better person to start with than Sherry Willis. A psychologist at Pennsylvania State University, Willis and her husband, K. Warner Schaie, run one of the longest, largest, and most respected life-span studies, the Seattle